There’s a strangeness to the first few days after landing in another country, even one that you are familiar with and that you consider home. It’s perhaps best described as a form of defamilarization, of the type Russian Formalists such as Viktor Shklovsky write about. In everyday life, through habituation, what we see and our interpretation of it are run together, so that we instantly and unknowingly no longer see the surface or texture of life. Return to a familiar place after a time away, and this process is interrupted: we notice the surface of things again, and experience defamiliarization.
What did I notice coming to Singapore this time? As always the heat, which your body takes a little time to adjust to, that sudden blast of warm, wet air just as you step outside of the air conditioning at Changi. We usually take a taxi back home, but this time I went downstairs in the airport to catch a Grab. Again, that pause of adjustment. After a few months away, the app’s interface has changed, part of Grab’s growing transition to becoming an “everything app” rather than just a ride-hailing service. I had to explore a little to find “transport” and to book my car; a few more minutes of watching the driver navigate the various roads outside Terminal 3, and the car came, sleeker, lower, more modern than I expected, its leather still carrying a faint trace of that distinctive new car smell.
More things I noticed in the first day or two. Singapore seemed surprisingly ugly compared to the beauty of Vancouver’s West End. It didn’t rain for the first week I was back, and the tropical vegetation seemed less lush than before. Added to that, a loss of a sense of both scale and a connection to the past. In the West End, new high rises now dominate at the bottom of Davie Street and in the corridor between Thurlow and Burrard. These are as high as HDB flats or new condos in Singapore. Yet there are also strange discoveries: old wooden house or condos that you didn’t notice before, some recently renovated but others wearing a patina of age. In Singapore nothing, it seemed, could quite be allowed to grow old. The trees on the PIE had been replaced for road widening and had now grown up again, but they would never be very mature. My housing estate, built twenty years ago, was just beginning its fourth round of repainting. A few days later, I visited a friend at a downtown condo. It was beautifully built, and the development skilfully incorporated older heritage buildings on the site: an old school hall had become the clubhouse, with a gym, and a chapel had been transformed into a restaurant. And yet the old had somehow been made new; it could not simply moulder, as the structures in the West End do, or be refurbished in a slow, organic process.
When I came back to the familiarity of our flat on our first day, all the material from the May General Election was there, in a neat pile on our dining table . Changing boundaries moved us from a Group Representative Constituency (GRC) to a Single Member Constituency (SMC), and there were a number of glossy magazinese, some from the election material from the ruling party, and others issued by parastatals, all featuring our MP with her photogenic smile. These magazines proudly presented evidence of newness and progress: upgraded parks, housing and transport facilities. Something in them made me think of Boey Kim Cheng’s poem “The Planners,” which I’d taught at NIE in the 1990s:
They plan. They build. All spaces are gridded,
filled with permutations of possibilities.
The buildings are in alignment with the roads
which meet at desired points
linked by bridges all hang
in the grace of mathematics.
They build and will not stop.
Even the sea draws back
and the skies surrender.
I went down to the coffee shop near to our block, and discovered that it had also been renovated: it was brightly lit, with new stalls, bustling, but the old Eightways 八道 Zi Char stall, with its whiteboard announcing the menu, and its purple-uniformed servers, mostly from Malaysia, had gone.
And then, of course, you very quickly stop noticing difference. You visit family members and old friends. It’s durian season and so you buy the fruits, and chicken rice in packets, wrapped in vast quantities of Styrofoam and plastic that you’d never see in Canada. You rent a car, and when you’re driving the smells of chicken rice mingle with those of durian. Rain comes suddenly and heavily, and you grope for the windscreen wipers, which are on an unfamiliar stalk somewhere. All the traffic slows down. You’re back in the moment, and you think you’ve never been away.
And yet, despite this, something lingers, after those conversations with friends. In those quiet moments back on our estate at midday, looking out to the hill, the grass strimmers buzzing, you realise that something has shifted. You’ve aged, perhaps, and with ageing you are beginning to feel less part of this world, whether you are in Vancouver or in Singapore. You are tired; the business of living takes up more time. You have never quite had faith in this world with its promises, and you tried to make it more just, but you now also have less faith in your own capacity to make change.